With the advent of in-line sensing technologies, it has become more and more common that color marking systems are able to gather information about image quality (IQ) defects and utilize that information, for example, to improve their image quality performance. The success of these technologies relies heavily on the timely availability of the information of image quality defects. One option for obtaining IQ defect information is through on-belt sensing of test-patterns at the inter-document zones (IDZs) or on the normal imaging area of the belt without making test prints on-paper. However, on-belt sensing suffers from several limitations. Among these are that it is only appropriate for measuring single-separation colors since unfused toner is essentially opaque and toner layers below the surface cannot be adequately sensed. Another limitation is that the on-belt measurement is not in itself relevant to the customer because the customer sees only the fused toner image on-paper. As a result, it is generally not feasible with current approaches for enabling technologies such as those which require IQ defects information corresponding to the customer-relevant measurement of fused toner image on-paper over a full range of colors. Moreover, since the severity of image quality defects tends to change over time (due to wear-and-tear, etc.) it is important that image quality defect information over the entire color gamut of the device be updated constantly.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for determining device image quality performance of single-separation colors in complex digital document reproduction architectures.